I've personally been pining for a DVD release with every music video (which would probably cost a fortune, but I'd be willing to sell plasma for), but alas, such does not exist.

The recent discussion of the new Serious Moonlight DVD has me wondering about what constitutes a good Bowie DVD. I wasn't really pleased with the DVD from Best of, but I thought the Black Tie White Noise bonus DVD was excellent. Short, but marvelous.

Then again, I did use the BTWN DVD for quotes and such in a little report I did on Bowie as a kind of pop anthropologist, so maybe my favoritism is unfair.

But anyway, those are the only ones I personally own. If Serious Moonlight is so shoddy, then what is it being compared to? What are the best Bowie DVDs?

On a side note, this site seems to lack a comprehensive list of the DVD releases. Hmmm...

The reason Serious moonlight is shoddy is because it offers less content than the original videos released 21 years ago, I find all the officially released DVDs have been very good, although the sound and editing on the Reality dvd is poor.

One of the best DVDs I have seen sadly isn't for sale and that is Loreley 96.

I never really understood some of the negative feeling toward Best of Bowie. When it first came out, I thought it was the most tremendous Bowie DVD ever released, and still feel that way. People forget that some of the 90's videos were at that time not available in any capacity and having came into Bowie in '99, I had never even seen most of them. Yeah, there's videos missing, but the wealth of what it did offer (then unreleased later videos and cleaned up versions of early ones) still make it, for me, the ultimate Bowie DVD.

BTWN is an interesting documentary, but the DVD is no improvement over the VHS.

The general argument against Serious Moonlight is that, like BTWN, it offers nothing new, and with songs being edited out, is even shoddier than what we were offered before.

I think the reason there are complaints about Bowie DVDs is, simply put, because there's no involvement from the man himself.

Most of Bowie's DVD releases have come from concerts previously available on video. The thing that most makes a DVD worthwhile are the special features. If there's no involvement from Bowie, what kind of features can you really have? ZSTMP at least tried to make some, with the Visconti commentary, but there was a lot of dissatisfied fans there, too.

To my knowledge, Bowie has not been personally involved in any DVD of any of his concerts or motion pictures, even the ones more likely to sell. To make them satisfying to his fans, he's going to have to put his toe in the water sooner or later.

This new triple-dip release of TMFTE is supposed to have an Bowie/Nic Roeg audio commentary cribbed from a laser disc release, that's at least a step in the right direction.